


John, I'm Only Dancing

by timeheist



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-04
Updated: 2012-06-04
Packaged: 2017-11-06 20:29:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/422879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/timeheist/pseuds/timeheist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I know him. Well, knew him. Will know him.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	John, I'm Only Dancing

The Torchwood Three Hub could be a very quiet place sometimes; eventually, even Ianto went home and Myfanwy went to sleep, making the dingy dungeon of a headquarters Jack’s again. In all his years of service, and there were a lot of them to count, there was one very decisive thing he head learnt about his work and ‘home’. Much as he enjoyed company (pleasurable and nowadays generally Ianto-shaped) this was a place he actually needed to be alone sometimes. There was a strange sort of reverence to the place where he’d lost so many friends and colleagues that needed to be respected with the silence of his own thoughts every once in while. He could remember every face and every voice – he was starting to empathize with the Doctor – and he really had to record them one day out of respect. On his own, Jack could relax without having to maintain the charisma that he was known for. When the hub was quiet, he occasionally sang – old war songs that kept up his morale. And of course, when – like now – he found himself working past three in the morning, it was nice to be able to do so leisurely. By which he meant naked, and shamelessly.

The task for the night was to clean up rift activity records; not exactly, Jack had to say, his all-time favourite job. And he was awful at it, too. It was the kind of technological jargon and babble that Tosh thrived in but she’d twisted her ankle weevil hunting with Owen and her new gizmo so he’d sent her home early to get some rest. The several attempts that Jack had made to offload the job onto Owen had amounted to rude words and badly composed excuse that involved a blob-like alien they had in the vaults that carried a fatal electrical charge. They were trying to communicate with it without being killed so Jack had let him go, but only on the condition that he went down dressed in safety suit made of rubber, and a tight suit at that. Gwen had been promised a night alone with Rhys and Jack hadn’t the heart to break that promise now that the two of them were married, and after Ianto and Jack had ‘had a romantic coffee’ the Welshman had been in very much the wrong mood to focus on written words. Jack had had the same problem, but that was now four hours ago and he’d run out of reasons why he couldn’t sort the records. Lounged over a padded chair with a laptop connected to the network on his knees, he was frowning in deep concentration when it happened.

The TARDIS was a sound that Jack would recognize anywhere; he’d had several hundred years in which to learn the sound when he’d been waiting for the Doctor to return, after all. It was something he could only describe, when Ianto asked, as a whorp-whorp kind of noise that while being unique reminded him of the teleport devices that the Time Agency had used at their headquarters, and punctuated even the stone and steel of the Torchwood stronghold. Captain Jack Harkness dove to his feet, almost dropping the laptop (Tosh would have had his balls if he managed to break yet another computer) and grabbing his coat and trousers with a grin. Without his Doctor detector (here insert a severed hand in a jar) it’d be a little harder to find him, but if Jack could hear him he’d have to be within reasonable earshot of the TARDIS, unless he was imagining things, which was admittedly entirely possible. He did have rather a lot of fantasies about the Doctor… Maybe he’d drifted to sleep somewhere along the line while working?

Hopping into his shoes and leaving the top over his bare chest only partially buttoned up, Jack scribbled a quick note to his team about going to check on a rift disturbance, strapped on his vortex manipulator, and took the quick route to the street – not before setting up the security guard, of course. Under any other circumstances, he would never leave the Hub unprotected, but the Doctor was one of those extreme cases he had talked to the team about. As the TARDIS ‘whorped’ again and Jack took off at a run in the right direction, he didn’t allow himself to dwell on the details, nor the Doctor’s reasoning for returning to Cardiff so soon. Although in Jack’s timeline he’d only been dropped off again after The Year That Never Was three weeks ago, it could have been years for the Time Lord. Jack felt as though he hadn’t, felt he’d know if he did, but for all he knew the Doctor might have regenerated by now. So Jack only stopped to think when he reached the abandoned warehouse, still couldn’t see the TARDIS, and realised he was poised on the balls of his feet in the doorway of one of Cardiff’s most volatile rift tears.

Common sense told him not to go further – step into the rift and even with a (half) functional vortex manipulator he had no idea where he would turn up, and absolutely no guarantee that he would be able to get back. Especially because it had been the Doctor who ‘fixed’ it. But he couldn’t bring himself to simply turn and go home, for a number of reasons not all personal. Jack had once survived the Time Vortex, and since he couldn’t die he didn’t care much where he would up, as long as it didn’t get him eaten by a dinosaur. Next, Jack knew that whenever the TARDIS and Doctor turned up they either refuelled and quickly left, or had arrived because something was going wrong. Sometimes the Doctor was the cause of what went wrong. Or maybe it was the TARDIS – one of them had occasional chains of bad luck, anyway. So Jack had to check what was going on for the planet’s sake. Last, but not least, they needed this rift data, so that one day they’d finally be able to close it, so the risks had to be taken. If the Doctor had a way to sit idly in the rift as it appeared, maybe Jack could coerce him into sharing that knowledge for the good of mankind.

Taking a deep breath and mussing his hair Jack weighed up the arguments, including his own feelings towards the Doctor of occasional lust and betrayal about the Valiant. The Ex Time Agent rolled his shoulders, cracked his knuckles, pulled out his well-used pistol, and stepped over the threshold into the doorway of the warehouse.

***

It’s been a week since Jack wound up in 1973, Cardiff, and he still hasn’t been able to get back to 2008, Cardiff. He’s tried the warehouse and he’s tried every other rift spot in the city, but every time he gets a ‘hit’ as it were he’s either bounced to another side of the city, or nothing happens. He’s beginning to wonder if he’s going to have to spend the next thirty six years watching his back and doing his very best to note bump into himself, so he can get back to the date he left without causing a paradox. He could go back to America – he’s sure he’ll be able to remember the dates that Torchwood will send him there so that he can make sure to be in another state when it happens. But the long story short is that Jack can’t be bothered dodging himself for three decades. Where would the fun be in that? And with the kind of life he’s led both with the Doctor and with Torchwood all it is, is an accident waiting to happen. He can’t even hand himself in and get them to freeze him in the cryogenics chamber for the next thirty odd years, because there’s already another of him in the Vaults from the last time something like this happened, although Torchwood had been adamant that they didn’t know why. They’d been told to defrost him in 2009, a year later than Jack has come from, and he doesn’t want to jeopardize that. The only satisfaction he has from the situation is the night he spent in jail for indecent exposure under the pseudonym of John Smith, and the fact that he was in India in 1973, so he won’t run into himself walking, talking and conquesting.

Jack had checked himself into a motel that was worryingly close to the Torchwood Three Hub because he knew that Torchwood never found out he frequented it. It was easy enough to have a few words with the owner about having cut his vocation in India short, and Torchwood will never know about it. It was always where Jack hid out when he needed some time away from his employers, or where he took girls, boys and sometimes aliens when he wanted a quick shag and unfortunately happened to be on duty. The fact that he still has the same four digit pin on his bank account helps too, because he has the money to pay for living and eating in 1973 until he finds his way home, and a place where he’s safe from the prying alien of the public and of the alien hunters that Torchwood used to be. Not that he’s an alien, but he is a rift refugee, as they’ve started to call them come the 2000s when the world gets politically correct.

Jack paced the hotel room, cursing under his breath. Three days ago, he found the TARDIS; it wasn’t the TARDIS he knew, but since the Doctor was the only surviving Time Lord around, Jack doubted that the police box which appeared literally out of nowhere just out of sight of Torchwood’s surveillance cameras (Jack felt secretly touched that now that he’s in charge of Torchwood, the Doctor trusts him enough to park in sight of the Hub) belonged to anyone but him. There’s a different logo on the front and the police box is a slightly different size – the Doctor never explained when his chameleon circuit broke or how, so Jack wondered if the subtle changes were the TARDIS trying to repair itself. He tried to knock on the door, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it – after all, in Jack’s timeline he wasn’t supposed to meet the Doctor for another over thirty years, that’s what the young girl had told him. As far as Jack was concerned, that was that; until he found a loophole, he was in enough trouble as a fixed point in time and space as it was.

The day after that, Jack got shot by muggers, and had came to in an alleyway with the TARDIS parked only a few metres away from him. He’d felt hurt that the Doctor hadn’t come out to check on him, but there was a chance he hadn’t noticed him, or recalled Jack telling him there was a time and place for them to meet and was being careful himself. Discarding his shirt (Jack had never been fond of the overly flamboyant collars of the seventies anyway, nor the floral prints – they’d been almost medieval for someone born in the fifty-first century) he’d decided ‘to hell with this’ and had gone up to the TARDIS, knocking once and then, when there was no answer, pushed open the door. At the time, when he’d done staring in silence, he’d assumed that the Doctor had two new companions who he’d never met before. But now, pacing in his room, he had his doubts. Could he have crossed the Doctor’s timeline? And if so, who was the other man with him…?

If it was the Doctor, then he was older than Jack had ever seen him. Grey haired, and dressed in a red velvet coat, Jack isn’t guilty about ogling. The Doctor might have been older, but Jack reckoned he’s what people might have called a Silver Fox, if the term had been invented back in the seventies. The Doctor was no less attractive in Jack’s eyes (it’s probably the Doctor he finds hot, Jack reckons, not his looks (although maybe his looks too)) and from the sounds that the other man in the TARDIS, no less unqualified in the sexual department. Jack didn’t get a good look at the Doctor – the ends of his shirt, despite his lack of trousers, hid his length just well enough – but he recognized the magic that the Doctor could do with his mouth, and the other man clearly appreciated it, whoever he was. Jack stopped himself from wishing he was in black-haired man’s place by reminding himself that coveting the Doctor wasn’t a very good idea, and had snuck off again (unseen, as far as he knew) before he’d burst in for a closer look.

He was starting to wish he’d arrived earlier, or waited to see more. Something confused him about the Doctor’s taste – no pun intended. While the Doctor was dressed in red, with flamboyant sleeves and an equally flamboyant collar with a purple coat of some sort, the other man was dressed entirely in black, right down (or up) to his well-trimmed beard. He too was attractive, in that way that only a Time Lord could be, and Jack wondered not for the first time if they were aware of the pheromone effect that they had on the human race. Even though he’d hated the Master, back on the Valiant, he’d found him and Harold Saxon attractive, and wouldn’t deny it. Unfortunately, the Master had used the information against him, but that was neither here nor there. Jack had caught a kiss after the black-haired man had finished, the Doctor clearly in love with him – if he was the Doctor… And if he was stuck in the 1970s then he wanted to see more.

Which was why he couldn’t help himself, now, when he left his hotel room, prepped his vortex manipulator, and went off in search of another TARDIS sighting. He was hoping he’d stumble upon them as he had before, although hopefully without being shot. And so when he did arrive and found ‘the Doctor’ outside waiting for him – his shirt a little less flamboyant and more like 70s fashion but with a flowery handkerchief in one pocket – he was a little relieved, and a little surprised. Jack convinced himself that he was just here to ask for a ride back to his century, nothing else. He hadn’t come to see more action, and he hadn’t come to attempt to join in. Although he got hard just thinking about the Doctor’s mouth, wondering if a different regeneration had the same oral fixation and skill… “Doctor.”

“…Do I know you?”

“It’s me! Jack!”

“No… Don’t think I know a Jack, sorry. Now, if you excuse me – “

“Doctor! Come on, don’t be like this! It’s me, Captain Jack Harkness, Torchwood Three, the Blitz!”

“Torchwood? Is that a club? It’s almost familiar…”

Jack groaned, desperately trying to make sense of what was going on. If the Doctor didn’t recognize him, did that mean he wasn’t a Doctor of the future, but a Doctor of the past? Torchwood had never had access to photographs of past regenerations and the Doctor had only ever shown them to him briefly, on an infostamp of some sort, but… A thought flashed through Jack’s head, memories of a UNIT employee that he’d slept with while undercover, Torchwood sending him to find out if the Doctor really was a UNIT employee. The beautiful redhead hadn’t told him much, but she had let slip a photograph, and Jack was sure the Doctor had mentioned being trapped on Earth… This was that Doctor. Suddenly, Jack was sure of it. And he really, really, shouldn’t have crossed the Doctor’s timeline by seven regenerations…! He swallowed; he couldn’t back out now, not when all he was looking for was a right home (and perhaps a chance to catch them in the act of… something, the Doctor and his current companion). “You work for UNIT.”

“With UNIT.” The man smoothed down his lapels, bright shades of plum and red, and raised an eyebrow. “Temporarily. Not the most indecent thing about being stuck on Sol-3, but largely helpful. If it weren’t for the Briga – “

“I know him. Well, knew him. Will know him.” Jack had been away from the Time Agency so long, he’d started to forgot how you referred to an event chronologically in the future that had occurred in your past. Shaking his head in a tiny arc, he let it slide. There were more important things to focus on. He noticed for the first time that the Doctor’s sleeves had motel oil on them, and let himself into the TARDIS, pulling memories from his mind with difficulty. “You’re not an exile anymore.”

The Doctor frowned. “Torchwood knows that?” He shrugged, rolling down his sleeves. “But that is correct. Since you claim to know me intimately, I’ve been doing some repairs on the old girl. Bessie’s been less than pleased I’m leaving but maybe I can get her into a spare room and take her with me, or something.” The third Doctor seemed to have no quarrel with Jack in the TARDIS, for which the fixed point was grateful. He didn’t seem to complain about the strange nature of Jack’s genetics, either not noticing, or not caring. It was nice to meet a Doctor who didn’t judge him for something that was his own companion’s fault. For all the care the tenth Doctor had for him, Jack knew he still found it hard to accept Jack in his TARDIS. There was a reason he came to Jack, and not the other way around.

“Bessie?”

“Vintage car. Beauty. Always been interested in gadgets and vehicles, you know. Or maybe it was just this regeneration – I do my best not to think about the last one.”

“You should watch Top Gear.” Jack smirked, relaxing a little more in the Doctor’s company, eyes scanning the console room. It was different, as though half rebuilt from the Doctor’s days in exile. Wires hung down that Jack hadn’t seen when he’d just looked through the door before, and it was a different colour scheme, not the off-turquoise and melted copper that Jack had grown accustomed to since meeting the ninth Doctor for the first time. He wondered how they would react now, with memories of Jack in their past, or if they’d remembered him all along. Then again, this third Doctor might not have remembered him at all; he wasn’t the same man that his ninth regeneration was going to meet, after all. He kept an eye out for the other man in the TARDIS, but didn’t bring him up. For all Jack knew, this Doctor might have been so different to his later selves that all Jack had seen was him and a rent boy. But he doubted it – they seemed too close for that. What Jack had seen, although hot, was love-making, not senseless sex.

“Top Gear?”

“Motoring show in the twenty first century. You could probably tell them a think or two – I think there’s a fifty first century cult dedicated to it as well, the Cult of Clarkson or something like that.” Jack wrinkled his nose , quite obviously unimpressed with the idea Jeremy Clarkson should wind up with so much attention one day, and the Doctor frowned in concentration. Inwardly, Jack grimaced; what was he doing, talking about his timeline and the places that he’d been so flamboyantly? There was so much at stake, and now, the game had been given away that he, too, was a time traveller.

“You’re not a Time Lord.”

“One hundred percent Boekind human, Doctor. Well, I say one hundred percent – you’ll find out one day.”

“I… See. So when will – “

“And who is this, Doctor?”

“Master,” Looking at the newcomer, the same man from before, Jack choked, “This delightful young fellow calls himself Captain Jack Harkness. Have you heard of him?”

Jack clenched and unclenched his fists, and the Doctor seemed oblivious. In fact, his attention, Jack realised, was completely captivated by the Master, watching every step that the man took and every movement of his hips, his mouth, his eyes. Jack had to stifle an angry frown; this may have been a past Master, but it was still the Master. Evil, in Jack’s opinion, incarnate, and seemingly immortal. He met the Master’s eyes with difficulty, chin jutting out and eyes narrowed, and the Master answered with an almost unperceivable smirk. Jack knew that he could sense the fear in his eyes and he was enjoying it, albeit in a much more suave manner than his Harold Saxon persona. He didn’t know anything about The Year That Never Was, how could he, but he knew that Jack knew something. And seeing him dressed in tight black velvet did absolutely nothing for Jack’s concentration. He wanted to hate – his body had other ideas.

“Captain Jack Harkness? I haven’t the faintest idea. He’s not trying to sell anything, is he?” Jack barely kept his mouth shut. “Or have you picked up another human pet? So soon after Miss Grant?” He tsked. “Should I be jealous?”

“No, no, nothing like that, he just…” The Doctor trailed off, circling past Jack to lace himself around the Master, then tipped his head to one side. “What are you here for Captain Harkness?”

“Call me Jack.” Jack sighed, did his best not to comment on how the Master and the Doctor were together, to jeopardise his way home. He could have a go at the tenth Doctor about it instead if he really had to, but for now, the Master had to be given the benefit of the doubt. “I need a lift back to my own time. Or rather, the time I’m meant to be in. The Cardiff rift pulled me here.” He forced a smirk, and a laugh, “I hate the seventies…” He sighed sadly, putting his serious tone back on, and tried to ignore that the Master’s hand was in the Doctor’s pocket. “And I have a team to look after. So… I’d be grateful. You’ll understand why in a few hundred years.”

Jack waited with bated breath. The Master looked cynical. The Doctor pursed his lips, deep in thought.

“Few hundred years, you say?”

“Yep.”

“Well then.” The Doctor grinned, pecked the Master on the cheek, and shut the TARDIS door. “You can buy me a drink then. Where do you want to go?”


End file.
